Session 9: Review and Feedback

Key Links

The ultimate purpose of review is to ensure that your OER is well-structured and ready to be used in the classroom. Review can help you get critical input and suggestions for change that will make your OER even stronger. By sharing your book with subject experts, you can ensure that the content is appropriate, accurate, and adequately covers the material. At heart, review is about bringing more hands on deck to invest and help your resource.

Today’s session covered the different kinds of review, workflows for these processes, and important considerations for this stage of your projects. We looked at a few central documents and questions that may support you all, and also do a bit of forward thinking about how to share the results of this process!

  1. Peer Review: ‘Peers’ can offer constructive feedback and solutions to improve the quality of educational content. We encourage you to reflect, recognize, and minimise biases in peer review. For instance, consider what types of feedback you need and who can speak to the quality of your content besides another instructor — would an industry expert be able to input? Think back to your SLOs — whose subject matter perspectives are needed to help determine whether the OER is built to help students achieve these outcomes?

  2. Accessibility Review: The accessibility review involves a thorough run through the different output formats of your OER looking specifically at the web accessibility in each format. A specific set of accessibility criteria can guide the people in your team who are tasked with this form of review to ensure that your resource meets the desired accessibility standards. The goal is to make as accessible an OER as you can, knowing that there is always opportunity for improvement down the road.

  3. Classroom Review: This form of review is particularly powerful because it invites feedback from the students which ultimately will help your team to determine necessary improvements for future iterations. Feedback can be gathered both from the instructor using the book to teach as well as the students using the book to learn. Try to identify some academic and non-academic measures as you gather comments from the classroom.

We provided a Review Guide Template [link above] that will help you establish review workflows and identify expectations and central guiding questions to better structure your review process and support reviewers. The adoption activity is is laid out in more detail in the handout for session 9 [linked above].

In the final part of our session, we participants engaged in a discussion activity around which you can access in this forum. Please post your answers below, @may24a-cohort

While this stage is fairly straightforward, it’s critical to prepare all the documents and workflows ahead of time to ensure smooth sailing. And remember: along the way, if you have any questions - do not hesitate to lean on each other and the open community, including the Rebus forum, cohort members, and myself.

Next week, we’ll begin looking towards the book’s official launch with a session on formatting and release preparation. This phase is one where your project really begins to take shape as a whole, usable resource.

Let me know if you need anything,
Tasha

One of the questions that A&P is considering is “Are figures accessible and inclusive?”

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  1. Is the information both accurate and up-to-date?
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How will your team invite and value a broad range of reviewer perspectives? Our team currently has one reviewer identified for each chapter. However, the entire team reviews together during our working meetings to ensure that additional perspectives have been included.

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With what non-traditional subject matter experts would you like to work (students, community members, etc.)?

I would like to have student reviewers. Our group has discussed the reality as we see it – that students do not often read textbooks. I would like a student or two to provide their opinion on the readability and whether they would be able to commit to reading the text when directed by their instructor.

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What non-traditional subject matter experts you’d like to work with? (students, community members, etc.)

I like getting student input and feedback to ensure what I present is relevant and valuable to them. We should be writing with our target audience in mind.

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How will your team address bias in the review process? Each person on the team has to both write chapters and review different chapters. I believe this will allow us to ensure that multiple sets of eyes are on each chapter, and we will be able to identify any issues early on because individuals will have different perspectives when reading the chapters. We are pretty open to discussing different points of view.

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  1. What non-traditional subject matter experts you’d like to work with? (students, community members, etc.) I’d like to have feedback of students, especially around relevance to their generation.
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  1. What non-traditional subject matter experts you’d like to work with? (students, community members, etc.)
  2. Emergency Managers, FEMA, Local Parish OEM Directors, citizens
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One of the questions that we are considering to ask during our review process is whether we are discussing trending things, or whether the information we include should discuss “evergreen” topics and technology.

What project specific questions you would like to ask during the review process?

Because CDL driver’s have to follow both federal guidelines, as well as individual state guidelines, we want to make sure that perspectives from every level are highlighted. We want to have specific to Louisiana content as well as Federal content. It would be great to have new CDL drivers, as well as driver’s from other states review the content to make sure that it is transferring and accessible and understandable for all.

What non-traditional subject matter experts you like to work with? (students, community members, etc.)

I would like to work with local community members such as students, school foodservice staff (e.g., cafeteria workers), managers and volunteers in food banks, soup kitchens, food pantries and other food distribution establishments as these individuals may be able to provide additional insight on the food and nutrition resources available to the residents of Louisiana. These individuals will also be able to provide valuable feedback on perceptions, barriers and benefits of the Louisiana food culture.

  1. How will your team attempt to manage the effects of bias in the review process?
    Our team has fostered and will continue to foster open dialogue about and subject. Our team have facilitated crucial conversations, enabling us to reach solutions that are best for the project. Therefore, I believe that we, as a foundation team, operate in a safe environment where we are willing to manage the effects of bias in reviews and are open to recommendations.

Great work, everyone! Really enjoyed this conversation around setting review expectations.